Ronan Farrow

I will say at the outset of this reporting, I was not myself convinced of the, you know, much ballyhooed transformative impact of this technology.

I really emerged from this more convinced.

There's the scenarios that I think you're alluding to, right?

The atom bomb-esque ones.

The idea that this really could lead to a kind of Terminator Skynet scenario where a rogue artificial intelligence falls out of alignment with what we want and takes control of nukes.

But you don't have to buy into those extreme scenarios to also see the immediate impact that the entire U.S.

economy is now propped up by a few companies that are all in on AI, with open AI at the center of it, that most credible projections –

very immediately foresee millions of jobs being exposed to disruption by this, that it's already taking form as a significant change agent in the way weapons are used in battlefields, that they can now just fire without human operators.

That is something in the very immediate future.

It's taking form in bioweapon development.

These are all things that are happening or on the verge of happening, not far off fantasies.

Well, it started out as a nonprofit.

And this is really at the heart of the story.

This is a distinction that Elon Musk is now suing Sam Altman and OpenAI over.

So at the very beginning, Sam Altman, who had a lot of irons on the fire, right?

He was investing in a lot of different cutting-edge areas.

And AI became a fascination.

He saw the industry moving towards that.

And an interesting thing happened where he had been very optimistic about technology in general.

But he, I think, saw an inflection point, according to people we talked to who were in conversations with him at the time and knew his thinking, where a lot of the leaders in the industry were becoming more apocalyptic about it.